On June 27, Bondia and his family will make an hour-and-a-half drive from their home in Hodgenville, Kentucky, to Lexington, to pick up a copy of his comic in print. Crabgrass will debut in about 30 McClatchy newspapers and websites on Monday.
My drive (bicycle ride) will be considerably shorter since McClatchy publishes
a newspaper ten miles south of here and it is distributed in my hometown.
© Tauhid Bondia
Crabgrass by Tauhid Bondia debuts this coming Monday
and gets a nice article in McClatchy’s Miami Herald.
Three years ago, Bondia connected with Shena Wolf, then a director of comics and acquisitions at Andrews McMeel Universal, and began the development phase of Crabgrass. Wolf would leave notes to make sure the characters developed and the jokes landed.
“A newspaper syndicated cartoonist is like the truest definition of a cartoonist in my mind because I’m of a certain age and that’s what I grew up with,” he said.
By his setting the strip in the ‘80s, Bondia, 45, wanted to tap into nostalgia and appeal to an older base. But the only signs of the time period are the lack of cellphones and the comic’s name. Everyone struggled to get rid of the crabgrass in their yards back then, Bondia said.
Full introductory article at Miami Herald.
Above: Selected scenes from “Kevin’s Bad Day” – more at Tauhid’s Patreon or at Instagram.
Elsewhere GoComics Blog interviewed Tauhid yesterday.
Your book, Crabgrass: Comic Adventures, is set to release on September 20 (and was recently given a glowing review by Kirkus!). What can readers look forward to in the book?
I think the overall theme of Crabgrass is one of the enduring nature of childhood friendship and I really wanted the book to represent that. It’s my hope that readers will see themselves and their own friendship in Kevin and Miles.
Are there any sneak peeks on upcoming adventures of Miles and Kevin you can share with us?
Sure. In the first major arc after the newspaper launch Kevin gets lice and Miles shaves his own head in solidarity. That’s all I’ll say, but that’s just the beginning.
disclosure: The Daily Cartoonist (children of The Sixties) and Crabgrass (children of The Eighties) are related by way of Andrews McMeel Universal (a child of The Seventies).
It looks like McClatchy dropped “Diamond Lil” to make room for “Crabgrass”. Getting McClatchy and its’ copycat comics pages (Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer, Kansas City Star, etc.) is big.